The “background” description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description which may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly or impliedly admitted as prior art against the present invention
Nowadays, most of the electronic devices, particularly multimedia devices, like personal computers, TV sets, DVD players, etc., are equipped with a so-called standby mode which keeps a limited functionality “alive” while the power consumption is very low, generally below 1 W. For example, the limited or restrictive functionality allows to switch on a device via a remote control, or to wake up a network device by a certain data packet transmitted via the network. One of such techniques is called “wake on LAN” which is an Ethernet computer networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or woken up by a network message. This network message is an Ethernet frame containing a specific data pattern. This specific data pattern may be detected by the network controller on the receiving end even if the receiving end is in the low power consumption state. The network controller then alerts the system and the power management circuitry wakes it up. In the art an Ethernet frame containing this specific data pattern is called a “magic packet” and the general data structure of such a specific data pattern is shown in FIG. 5.
Generally, a network device when set in the magic packet mode (standby mode), scans all incoming frames even when not addressed to the node for a specific data sequence which indicates the network device that this is a magic packet frame. A magic packet frame must also meet the basic physical layer requirements for the LAN technology chosen, such as bit timings. The specific sequence which is embedded in the payload or data portion of an Ethernet frame for example consists of sixteen duplications of the MAC address of the network device to be awakened, with no breaks or interruptions. This sequence of sixteen duplications of the MAC address must be preceded by a synchronization stream (preamble) which allows the scanning state machine to be much simpler. This synchronization stream or preamble is defined as six bytes of FF in the hexadecimal format (binary value: 1111 1111).
The magic packet technology is a very popular approach to control network devices in a low-power consumption state. This technology allows to switch on a network device from a low-power consumption state in a normal or high-power consumption state by just sending the magic packet over the network. However, any other control of a network device being in the low power consumption state is not possible.
For the implementation of certain applications it is appreciated being able to control network devices within a network environment. However, in today's network environments this control is typically restricted to a state in which the network devices being controlled consume high power. Hence, there is a demand to overcome the restrictions of the magic packet technology while enabling a wide range of control of a wide range of devices.